Cal Football: Ten Years Of Tedford Roundtable

Having been raised an Oregon fan and watching them when Tedford was there, I was stoked. I didn’t know he’d be able to turn things around so quickly, but I had hope.

was Tedford’s first game. Didn’t know anything about Cal football except for The Play and didn’t even know it was his first game as head coach. I was bored, flipping through the channels and it just happened to be on KRON4. The rest is history…

P.S. Thank the football gods that I didn’t have to live through Holmoe era. I seriously came away from watching that first game thinking that Cal had been relevant for years because they just dominated so much…

I would attend games and always wonder why my uncle was calling the coach a homo

RGBearTerritory Ryan Gorcey
#Cal fans, get ready for some good news on Wednesday. #dominos

Tosh Lupoi
@Coach_Lupoi
Who wants to play “DOMINOS” with your boi, Who’s going to play with this fam? #Cal #Calgang #GoBears #dominos

That “Cal football” hat is terrible.

I guess I’m one of the older guys (I don’t feel this way – I’m perpetually 29) on this blog. I first became a Cal fan when I watched the evening sports highlighting The Big Game’s no time remaining, Cal’s winning last play TD reception by Steve Sweeney from QB Vince Ferragamo. As a JC transfer I witnessed Cal football from 1973 thru the 1975 (Pac 8 co-champs + sentimentally one of Cal’s best teams) season. Bought season tickets in 1977 to date. I originally thought this is great. However over the years Cal would experience rare success (1982- The Play), Coach Snyder’s 1990-91 bowl game seasons and the endless hiring of HC’s (always hoped Cal would find a successful one) leading to more football mediocrity. As a long suffering Cal season ticket holder, (yes I did sit thru the lowest point of Cal football history: 1-10 2001 season – winless at Memorial), I read with interest AD Steve Gladstone’s hiring process during his selection of new HC Tedford. Never did I realize that he would be the “One” to restore Cal football excellence. From the first play of the 2002 season, to watching QB Aaron Rodgers, to this ground breaking 2011 season (10th and all time winning record) Coach Tedford has run the Cal program with the vision that he laid out. The realization of the soon to be completed STUDENT-ATHLETE HIGH PERFORMANCE CENTER (SAHPC), remodeling of Memorial Stadium, the upcoming 2012 recruiting class and the returning players give me great optimism that Cal football will be much talked about in the near future by everyone. Coach Tedford will finally reap the seeds that he planted 10 years ago. He will soon experience the lofty heights of sustained excellence in his program. Thank you Coach Tedford. Many Happy returns. “This is Cal football”.

After such a lovely record at an impressionable age, I was set for the 2002 season. I knew I had to make it to the game so I could see the bomb go off and the cannon blast, to watch something that always made Memorial happy. I knew I had to stick around and see the entertainment that was going to happen at half time, one of the guaranteed fun moments. And I went into every single game in 2002 expecting a loss. The previous season had taught me it was much easier to bear the pain of seeing us being decimated week in and out if you simply accepted it as what was going to happen. This thinking held through the 2003 season, even half way through the 2004 season (yeah, you might say 2001 had an effect on me). In short: aside from the 2004 season, the 2002 season was the most fun I have ever had going to Cal games simply going as a spectator. Nothing can compare now getting to be on that field, but 2002 was the most fun I had had in Memorial up to that point, and 2004 barely eclipsing it. It meant getting to see us put up points like there was no tomorrow. It meant we could block punts, recover fumbles, and stop opponents from moving the ball. It meant after growing up and watching year after year of close games, and an overtime match, I got to see the most fantastic sports moment of my life. I saw Memorial Stadium doing the wave, yelling, chanting, and jeering at a hapless Stanford team that I, not even knowing their record, assumed would win the game. I saw the grass disappear with 7 seconds left on the clock as the cannon boomed from the hill.

And as I will be seeing my 20th approaching in a few months, and two decades having passed, I have but one thing to say. Jeff, thanks for making the second one special. I may be eternally bitter and never trust the Bears to do anything, but you sure have made me smile this past decade like I know I never did the decade previous. Thank you so very much.

I was glad that the Tom Holmoe era was over. Cal football in 2001 had reached rock bottom. The prospect of a new coach was exciting, but Cal football was not a “destination job” in those days, so I knew that we probably going to make a real “splash” with the hire.

So when Jeff Tedford was introduced as the head football coach, I was cautiously optimistic. On the one hand, it seemed like this was a guy who was ready to be a head football coach and that he had a great track record with coaching quarterbacks and coordinating offenses. And his last year as OC a Oregon in 2001 was a fabulous year for the Ducks. On the other hand, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that wondered whether this like Keith Gilbertson all over again — hiring the OC off the Pac-10’s best team of the day didn’t exactly work out with Gilby.

Then came the season opener and the dazzling season-opening (I guess you could also call it “era opening”) play in the Baylor game — the double pass, 72-yard TD play to David Gray. And we won 70-22. I knew Baylor was bad, but wow. 70 points?!?

I was actually in attendance for the next game, the following week against New Mexico State. It was the smallest crowd I witnessed at a Cal game since the 1989 Washington game a few days after the Loma Prieta earthquake — 27,000, as a I recall, even though it was a very nice day at Memorial. We won the game 34-13 and I remember feeling pretty good about our chances the following week against 15th-ranked Michigan State. Call it my first experience with “Tedford Sunshine Pumping.”

When we beat MSU and started that whole mantra of “70,000 disappointed fans!” I really believed that Cal had hired the right guy for the job. Yeah, we had some disappointments that year, but I was still amazed that Tedford could walk in and go 7-5 with the same guys that had gone 1-10 the year before. And then, after we beat USC the following year, I started to fear we’d lose Tedford to a more high profile program.

I’m glad he didn’t leave. And I’m thankful that he has brought so much fun and joy to the biggest sports passion I have.

One, I was hyped that Gladstone had taken over at AD. After the Bad News Bob era, which stunted the Snyder era and gave us the Holmoe era, there needed to be change. I knew about Tedford, but I never thought we’d get him. Cal was never the school which was forward thinking. So when we got him, I was happy.

Like everyone else, it was that first play which showed me we had a different coach. Also, since we beat Baylor something like 70 million to nothing, it help blow away the stink of the 1-10 season. However, it was the win over MSU on ESPN, that made me a believer.

That said, Tedford may frustrate, but he has more than earned his continued tenure. He’s been a loyal Bear, and the football program has never been at this point (in the modern era). Go Bears and Go Tedford!

Like a lot of my fellow geriatrics on this blog, I approached the news of Tedford’s hiring with a bit of a jaundiced eye, but with hope. After all, I’d lived through Kapp, Gilby, and Holmoe, along with the bungled handling of Snyder and Mooch, so you can certainly understand being a bit cautious about Tedford.

Of course, that caution was less about Tedford’s ability (which even I saw was considerable given Oregon’s performance), but more about the Cal Athletic Dept finding some way to totally screw things up.

Still, the fact that Cal hired a young, hungry kid who had these wild ideas and a truckload of eager energy was promising. Particularly after hearing a few interviews that Tedford gave early on. He said everything we Old Blues wanted to hear from our coach. Talk of pride, integrity, honesty, and the importance of remembering that Cal was athletics first.

Overall, I just remember that I was pleased at the annoucement, and pretty damn proud that not only has Tedford been the coach we wanted, but that the administration has come around as well.

I started Cal in the Snyder era so I figured all games were this exciting. My last semester was Gilby’s first year so it was still competitive. I still left without seeing a Big Game win. Mooch was promising until he left for greener pastures so when Tedford was hired, I figured it would be the same. It was a definite upgrade from Holmoe (how a DC with the worst D in the Pac-10 gets a head coaching job is beyond me). After the first year, and going to the UCLA and big game in ’02, I was excited, but wondering just when Tedford would jump ship to a top tier College program or possibly the NFL.

I’m excited that he seems to really want to be here, build a program, and really make sure the players are students first. Now it could be that in the last few years his luster has dulled and those jobs aren’t calling anymore. But I think our program will be stronger if he stays and leads the program for many more years than if he left or were fired and we hired the next hot coaching prospect only to have them leave and we’d have to do it all over again. I wouldn’t have imagined 10 years ago that we could have anything close to the SAHPC. Maybe 20 years ago if Snyder weren’t unceremoniously booted but not during the Holmoe era.

I think the title and the brief descriptors are a bit off for this post. This isn’t a piece looking at Tedford’s 10 years at Cal, rather I think it’s more of a reflection on how the desperate and kicked in the nuts fanbase felt at the time of his hire and the reactions of the 2002 season.

Out of his initial founding visions:

“Our team will be disciplined, our team will play hard,” he said. “They will play fast, they will play smart. They will have a lot of fun, but they will do it with class.”

I think we can say that year in and out, his teams haven’t always necessarily played with heart and discipline, but they’ve always been very fast and they always do it with class.

I had heard of Tedford up at Oregon but didn’t quite know that he was considered the genius behind Belotti’s offense so my expectation was pretty much neutral. However, I was sold with the very first snap of his tenure! We were watching the Baylor game on TV that day and the house went absolutely ballistic with that first play! And watching Boller play 10 times better than he ever had under Holmoe, I knew this was our guy. For the first time in a long, long time, there was a sense of hope and excitement about Cal football…anything was possible now.

GO BEARS!
GO TEDFORD!

This is the number of winning seasons Cal has had per decade:

• 1920s: 9
• 1930s: 7
• 1940s: 3
• 1950s: 4
• 1960s: 1
• 1970s: 7
• 1980s: 1
• 1990s: 3
• 2000s: 8

Clearly, it’s been a while since we’ve approached anything like the success under Tedford.

Also, Cal’s all-time record before Tedford was 557-441-51, a .555 winning percentage. With Tedford’s record so far of 79-47, Cal’s all-time record has improved to 636-488-51, a .563 winning percentage. It’s hard to move the needle much with over 100 years of history already on the books, but it’s clear that Tedford should be praised for revitalizing the football program.